


What Doesn't Kill You

by ferggirl



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 02:20:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1167482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferggirl/pseuds/ferggirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a mission goes horribly wrong, Jemma Simmons needs her wits (and her memories of a night with Grant Ward) to keep herself and Fitz alive. Can the scientist learn from the spy?</p>
<p>(This has some mild torture descriptions in it. Please be warned if that is something you prefer to avoid.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You are with me

She spits the blood pooling in her mouth sideways, watching as it arcs to the dirty tile floor. Then she turns her gaze back to the solider standing in front of her.

“My conditions remain the same. Let him go or you get nothing from me.”

Fitz is limp and far too quiet as he hangs on the metal grating opposite her in the small room. His hands are bound above his head and have been for three long days.

“And why would I do that?” Their captor laughs, smearing her bloody spit with the toe of his boot. He’s been in before, watching and supervising the other two men. But until now, he’s not gotten involved. “It’s much more fun to make you watch as I dismantle him.”

Fitz stirs, attempting to lift his head. It has been agony, watching him fade with each round of physical pain. He’s taken the brunt of it since they learned that Jemma has the skills they need.

She has to get him out while he’s still alert enough to activate the tracking device. 

******

“What  _do_  they teach you over at Operations?”

She was curled against him, loose and relaxed. Grant huffed a laugh and dropped a kiss on the shell of her ear.

“You know it’s strictly classified,” he said into her hair as she shivered pleasantly. “I could tell you…”

“…but you’d have to kill me?” She didn’t hide her sarcasm. “Isn’t that line a tad beneath a SHIELD specialist?”

"I know who’s beneath  _this_  specialist,” he warned, pulling her under him and retaliating with some well-aimed tickling. When she was breathless and laughing, he rolled back to his side and shook his head.

“Why would SciTech’s finest want to know ops techniques anyway?”

“It may have escaped your notice, but we have faced a couple of situations when I could have contributed if I had a tiny bit more…”

“Field training?” He raised one eyebrow. “Haven’t I been saying that since the very first day?”

She sat up, her hair falling across her shoulder. “Well you didn’t like me as much then. Let’s start now. I’ve been captured and you’re not there to save me. Lesson one?”

“Lesson one: play to their fears.” He guided her to straddle him and smiled. “You have to find your leverage.”

******

“Ah, he’s waking up. Maybe I’ll just hurt him until one of you tells us what we need to know.” The soldier’s grating laughter echoes through the small room.

“You won’t do that because you have a deadline,” she says confidently over the panic in her gut. “And your bosses will be quite unhappy if you fail. I’ve seen what they do to their failures, usually while I’m dissecting their scorched remains.”

The man is silent, and Jemma knows she’s struck a chord. So she pushes. 

“Besides, even if he had more than a basic grasp of chemistry… he’s rubbish under pressure.”

“But not you.” The soldier eyes her appreciatively. “Three days, and you’re still negotiating.”

“Yes, well, I’m a woman.” She tastes more blood, the sores in her mouth not healing as fast as they had yesterday. “Pain tolerance built up because of the monthly need to bleed internally and all.”

“And you are a chemist,” he continues, ignoring her. “I could just kill him.”

“You could, but not if you expect to meet your deadline and survive the week.”

“You are certain you can do what is needed?”

“I’m betting my life, aren’t I?”

“No, you’re betting his.” He winks at her and her skin crawls. “Your own chances of surviving the week are rather grim.”

******

“Lesson two: the key,” Grant said a bit later, trailing warm fingers up and down her bare spine, “is what you reveal.”

“Mmmm,” she edged closer, sleepy and seeking warmth. “Makes sense. If you say nothing they’ll increase the pain, so you have to give them enough that they think it’s working.”

He leaned down and kissed the base of her neck. “Exactly. Always have a plan. Know what information they want and give them what sounds important but isn’t.”

She shivered, the conversation and the chill in the room conspiring together. His shirt was a few feet away, hanging over a chair. “I thought it was name, rank and serial number,” she said, slipping to her feet.

His eyes followed her across the carpeted floor. “You’re not a soldier, Jemma.”

******

The first day is the scariest.

The mission goes all wrong, and Jemma and Fitz and Ward watch it unravel in horror from their place in a temporary lab just outside Shanghai. May is taking heavy fire and Coulson and Skye are pinned down by a laser security system that was not in the intel. Ward digs in his heels until Fitz figures out how to disarm the lasers. Of course it has to be done on site.

He kisses her hard and hands her a gun on his way out the door.

May is on her way back to them when the second crew breaks down the outer door. Fitz finds the GPS skin patches, but she’s across the room so he sticks them both behind his right ear unactivated to avoid immediate detection and removal. They manage to disable or destroy anything too sensitive before their room is breached. Jemma leaves Ward’s pistol on the table as the men with automatic weapons file in.

Black hoods block the light and she’s bound, gagged, and dragged away blind. Jemma keeps expecting the press of the gun barrel to be fatal. She doesn’t even know if Fitz is with her until hours later when she’s tied to some metal grating and the hood is pulled off.

They are across from each other, tied in some sort of mobile command unit’s back room. She spots the cameras right away, and watches her words carefully.

Fitz takes that as Fitz often does - personally. And since explaining will tip her hand far too early, she soldiers on and hopes that May and Ward are close.

As the hours tick by with no sign of their team, she and Fitz start avoiding each other’s eyes.

And then the soldiers come in.

******

“What about torture?” she asked seriously, slipping the black t-shirt over her head. It smelled like him, and she hugged it to herself as she walked back to bed.

His eyes snapped to hers, worry lurking in the back of his gaze. “What about it?”

“Are there techniques… things you do to resist?”

Grant pulled the blankets to the side and watched as she climbed in beside him. He was quiet for so long that she assumed he’d fallen asleep. It wasn’t until his arms tightened around her waist and he buried his face in her hair that she realized he was still weighing his answer.

******

Electricity. It’s something they’re both intimately familiar with, that they bend to their will and their needs daily.

It makes Jemma scream. Fitz, desperate on day two to make them leave her alone, yells that they’re hurting the only person who can solve their problem.

They stop then. They stop and make him repeat and explain and they hold their cattle prod up next to her face and Fitz does. Over and over. He swears that she’s the only one who can fix the serum that keeps killing their soldiers.

When the grey mist fades from her eyes and she can breathe well enough to support speech, she curses him loud and long.

He doesn’t hear her. His own screams drown her out.

******

“I was just curious,” she said after another silent minute had passed. “You don’t actually have to-”

“It’s fine,” Grant said, his voice ragged with some memory he chose not to share. “If they, if they hurt you, you have to accelerate the plan. Give up the game and get to the point. Anything that gets you out of the pain puts you in a better position.”

“But what if they want-”

“You give it to them. You stay alive. And you trust that I am coming to kill them all.”


	2. Take a stand

She’s been hanging by her wrists for three days, with armed men hurting her, hurting Fitz, screaming at her. And the entire time, Jemma has been listening.

She knows her captors and their employers have a problem. She knows she and Fitz were the targets of the attack. She knows enough about the chemical principles involved to guess at the solution.

And she knows that, somewhere, Grant is looking for her.

She is done waiting.

“I’m not negotiating for my life,” Jemma snaps. “How long have your men been showing symptoms? One week? Maybe two? How much longer can you expect them to last?”

There is silence in the small room, and she can hear the sound of the tires on rough pavement.

“I won’t help you until he’s free.” She considers the team of seven who had grabbed them originally. She’s only seen three since the hood came off. Still… “In a public place, so I know he’ll stay alive.” The leader hesitates and so she repeats her trump card. “You won’t save your men or yourself without me.”

She knows she’s won this round. The leader snaps something in Mandarin and they cut Fitz down.

He’s groggy, hardly lucid, and Jemma has a moment of fearing that all she has bought is a slower death for her best friend.

Then he looks her in the eye and reaches up to scratch behind his ear. He has raved before of how the chip in the patch activates with friction.

Fitz has just summoned the cavalry.

He’s dragged from the room. The last thing she hears is him calling her name before the door slams shut.

The vehicle shudders to a stop a few minutes later, and her captor holds up a phone with a video feed to show her Fitz being unceremoniously dumped into a rural marketplace full of nervous farmers.

She is alone.

Her own bonds are cut once the unit starts moving again. She’s shoved through two doors to a tiny closet with basic science equipment and a cabinet full of carefully labeled chemicals in English and Chinese. A nervous looking young man in a lab coat nods to her from a stool in the corner.

There are three vials of blood waiting on the counter.

“You have 12 hours,” the leader warns. “Fix it.”

******

Grant jerks awake from the first sleep he’s had in days. Skye is yelling and he takes off for the conference room at full speed.

“Fitz! It’s Fitz! Oh my god, I found Fitz!”

Coulson and May are already there, looking tired and determined. She’s got a satellite zoomed in enough to see the hint of curls on the engineer’s Scottish head. He stands out among the concerned villagers, and the tracking signal is strong. Grant’s first thought is simple gladness to see their friend and colleague alive and well.

His second thought is that Fitz appears alone.

Skye is incoherent with relief, after three days of nothing. It takes May several minutes to get coordinates out of her. He’s in a village 50 miles over the border to North Korea.

“Is there another signal?” Grant asks once Melinda and Coulson have left. (She to get them as close as possible, he to negotiate their way closer.) “What about Jemma?”

Skye shakes her head. “I can’t tell. His is so clear, and it just popped up a few minutes ago. I’ve been sifting through the data, trying to check for any sign of another signal. Fitz or Simmons would understand this better than me.” Her voice rises, the stress and frustration evident. “I’m just the hacker, I don’t actually do the science.”

“I know,” he tries to sound calm and understanding. She’s been working as hard as the rest of them, and as tirelessly. “Just – try to think like Fitz. What would Fitz do?”

“He’d complain that you were trying to do his job for him, and Simmons would laugh and point out that you couldn’t even if you wanted to. And then Fitz would wave his tool threateningly in her direction as he parsed the code for the – OH.”

Just like that, her fingers fly across the keyboard. Grant holds his tongue and hopes, desperately, that Jemma’s hiding somewhere in the data.

She has to be. That kiss can’t have been goodbye.

It’s another twenty minutes before Skye’s head comes up. “Look at this,” she says uncertainly. He’s around the table in a heartbeat.

There’s a trail, a series of weaker dots that start in the village where Fitz’s tracker glows brightly. These skip around, but mostly they seem to be following a road.

“She’s in a vehicle,” he says, releasing a breath he’s been holding for three unthinkably long days. “They’re taking her to Pyongyang.”

He can work with that.

******

It takes Jemma three hours to determine what has gone wrong in the serum her captors have used on their hired help. Her hands keep cramping, and her vision is surprisingly blurry, or it would have been two hours. Her “assistant” mostly sits in the corner taking notes on everything she does. She’s tested his reaction by pulling out certain volatile chemicals – he either has a perfect poker face, or he’s not a chemist at all. The writing doesn’t look like Chinese to her.

It looks Korean. She files that information quietly away.

With nine whole hours before the threat of the cattle prod resurfaces, she finds her mind sharper and her adrenaline pounding. The memory of Grant’s arms around her and that night in the hotel two months ago when she’d quizzed him about ops and strategy has gotten her this far.

Fitz is safe. Grant is coming. It’s time for Jemma Simmons to take a stand.

She’s even been handed her own weapons of choice. Chemicals and equipment. For the first time in three days, Jemma bites back a smile. They will pay for letting her in here.

She has seven vials of highly explosive chemicals and a much larger beaker cooking when a knock sounds on the door.

The silent man in the lab coat answers it, and speaks to the head soldier in what she is sure is no dialect of Chinese. His distraction gives her enough time to pocket the tubes and turn up the heat on the beaker.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she says, wilting a bit and looking sad and desperate. “Now.”

She knows it exists. She’s been marched there, hands tied behind her back, for several humiliating visits over the course of this hell.

A soldier is directed to follow her and she leaves the scientist and the commander deep in conversation. Jemma moves quickly, hoping they’ll attribute her urgency to natural causes, not a need to get far away from the mix of chemicals she’s just ignited. She closes the door and has just braced it with her shoulder when the first explosion rocks the vehicle.

Her guard goes running to help and she counts to three before she peers out to see what awaits her.

There’s a hole in the side of the truck. It is parked, and still upright, but that chemical mixture is nearly impossible to extinguish, and she can smell plastic and rubber burning. There’s another scent, more like barbecue, but she does her best not to think about what that means. The hallway is clear, as far as she can tell through the choking smoke.

She darts out, staying low, and turns away from the explosion to the back of the truck. The most likely place for an exit door based on the size and location of the rooms she has seen is behind her and to the left. She places three of the sealed test tubes on their sides carefully in her wake. They’ll combust as soon as they are opened or crushed.

And just in case she’s wrong, she has four vials left to blow another hole in her prison.


	3. For right now

There is a door, but it’s key-card locked. She tries for a desperate minute to pry open the box but fails, her fingers too weak and useless. The shouts from the fire are muffled, but a smaller, closer explosion makes her spin around to see a man engulfed in flame.

It hits her then, as he runs screaming away down the smoke-filled hall. That other smell. She’s  _killing_  them.

The nausea hits her hard and she smashes her elbow into the box until it pops free. She stares at the tangle of wires for a few seconds before she reaches in and tears them all out at once. Fitz would be appalled. This is more Grant’s style.

The door demagnetizes and she throws it open, looking around the dark parking lot for signs of safety or a place to hide. It yawns open and empty, an early-industrial nightmare complete with slab-concrete buildings a few hundred yards in the distance.

The soldiers, whoever is left, will notice soon enough that she’s gone.

Jemma takes off at a limping run. Everything hurts and she can’t breathe properly. She holds her remaining explosives, two in each hand, to keep from accidentally jostling them open and killing herself.

She makes it to the sidewalk before the gunfire breaks out. Scrambling behind a concrete planter with no plants in it, she considers her options.

If she’s guessed correctly, they’re in North Korea. That means her original plan of finding a crowd of people and just calling for help is useless. How can she disappear into one of the most closed-off cities on the planet? Plus, the GPS tracker is on the truck and will disappear in the fire, so the team –  _Grant_  – won’t know where she is once she leaves.

She crawls to the next planter and bites her lip, peeking over the edge. The trailer is burning, bright and vicious against the night sky. She can see shadowy figures circling it, guns at the ready, and the occasional burst of gunfire illuminates the shooters’ silhouettes more sharply.

When it goes quiet, she huddles in her hiding spot and holds her breath, trying to be as small as possible. The night air is cold and she’s shivering and starving and all of her pain is demanding to be felt at once. Her bravery slips away into the forbidding darkness alongside her certainty that this mess of an escape plan will work.

Without the gunshots to cover the noise, the approaching footsteps are ominously loud. Her hands sweat and the vials of explosive liquid feel heavy in her grasp.

“Simmons! Jemma?”

May’s voice is so unexpected that she almost sets herself on fire.

“Oh, my god, A-Agent May, here – I’m here!”

“I’ve got her!” May shouts as she rounds the planter and crouches down, a relieved smile on her normally unreadable face. “It’s good to see you, kid.” She glances at the mini-bombs of volatile chemicals clinking in Jemma’s shaking hands. “You want to let me hold those for a while? I think you’ve done your share of damage.”

“Please. I’m almost certain that I’m going to immolate myself at any moment.” Jemma lets May gently pluck the dangerous vials away from her. The moment they’re no longer in her care, her body starts to give in to the relief and pain warring for attention. “Oh…  _oh_ , I’m going to be sick.”

Then he’s there, emerging at a run from the smoke and the darkness. He’s  _there._

She sees Coulson run up behind him, but it’s Grant’s arms that go around her, Grant’s voice murmuring comfort in her ear as she retches into the empty planter. When she’s finished vomiting, he produces a bottle of water so she can rinse her mouth.

She wants to drink it all, but he pulls it away. “Easy, Jemma, you have to take it slowly.”

She knows, medically, that he’s right. She just doesn’t care.

 “I feel,” she mutters, “that I have earned a bottle of water.”

“Oh, and you have,” he says, his voice cracking as he swings her up into his arms. “But this brilliant and beautiful doctor I know gave me very strict orders regarding dehydrated patients.”

“Damn her,” she says. But there’s no fight in it. The feel of his arms and the sound of his heartbeat through his bulletproof vest are comfort enough for now. “Fitz?”

“Waiting impatiently for you with Skye,” Coulson says from her right. They walk, sticking to the shadows as the rest of the city becomes aware of the destruction in the parking lot they’ve left behind. “He’s in rough shape, but I’ve got SHIELD’s second best doctors on flights to Australia.”

The gentle compliment makes her smile, as Coulson intends. The getaway car is a small grey sedan parked on a side street. It’s the opposite of those ostentatiously governmental SHIELD SUVs they roll off the Bus each mission.  

Coulson and May take the front seats, and Grant slides into the back without putting her down. They make for the coast, where there’s a boat waiting to take them out to international waters. She’s drifting in and out of sleep, but rouses herself enough at one point to ask, “How did you like my smoke signal?”

May glances in the rearview mirror at her, and smiles. “Impressive. I can’t believe the idiots gave you access to all of those chemicals.”

“Showed up nice and clear on Skye’s infrared sensors,” Coulson says.

Grant’s praise is fainter. “You could have left me a bit more rescuing.” When she glares up at him, his face softens, creasing into an almost-smile beneath dark eyes heavy with guilt and fear. “I had a lot of worry to work off. You had too much of the fight finished by the time we got there.”

******

It isn’t until he’s dozing in a chair by her hospital bed in Sydney that she remembers to tell him.

He comes awake sometime after 2 am, and catches her restless hand in his own.

“Still can’t sleep?”

“Still not a great idea, no,” she says softly. She’s afraid of hearing Fitz scream in her dreams.

“What can I do?” His hair is mussed and he’s unshaven, the stubble making his cheeks and chin slightly abrasive when he leans over to kiss her forehead.

“Remember that night, in the hotel in Manila?” she says, needing to talk about something that isn’t nightmares.

“Of course I do.”

She blushes. “I didn’t mean… well, that’s certainly part of what I – oh, stop looking at me like that, I’m being serious.” She swallows and looks out the window. “You gave me… lessons.”

“In ops.” His voice is rough and regretful. “I should have insisted on training for you both.”

“Grant,” she says warningly. “This is not your fault.” The entire attack was orchestrated to split up the team and render the two scientists vulnerable. They could not have known. “But that night – you did teach me, you know.”

He’s silent, and she appreciates it. She hasn’t talked much yet about what happened. Fitz has also been quiet. He’s next door, with Skye keeping watch tonight. The pain is hard to think about, never mind share. The smell of death, death that she  _caused_ , haunts her as much as Fitz’s pain keeps her awake wondering if she could have freed him sooner.

“I’m sure I did it all wrong. But it gave me courage,” she says finally, and his hand tightens around hers. “You promised to come for me. And you did. You were there, guiding me, every step of the way.”

“You were brilliant,” he whispers. His eyes squeeze shut, and when he opens them again they’re bright with moisture. “I was late.”

“A bit, yes,” she whispers back. For the first time since she cursed Fitz for revealing himself to be useless, there are tears streaming down her face.

Grant slides onto the hospital bed and holds her through the storm of emotion. When it clears, the fatigue she’s fought for so long settles in like a heavy fog.  But there’s peace, too, and safety in his embrace. And that’s enough for right now.


End file.
